Do you shop on Amazon? Even if you don’t shop there regularly, you must have purchased at least an item or two in the past year. What is it about Amazon that makes shopping so easy? Is it good prices? A good shopping experience? Free shipping? Amazon Prime perks? All of the above?

With its unquestionable advantages, Amazon is slowly biting bigger and bigger chunks out of smaller businesses and stores. With its almost unlimited budget, it can offer things almost no other business can, and being so popular, it also offers the widest selection of add-ons, extensions, plugins, and other goodies, making the shopping experience even more frictionless.

While I think we should all prefer shopping in small local businesses when possible, sometimes Amazon is the best solution you have. For those times, you should have the best experience possible, get the best prices you can, and enjoy your shopping to the max. The Chrome extensions below will make your Amazon shopping just about perfect.

The Camelizer is a price tracker for Amazon, Best Buy and Newegg, which makes shopping better by providing you more data on prices. Don’t get confused, this is not a price comparison tool — this is a price tracker, and gives you a glimpse into the price history of the item you’re thinking of buying.

When you’re looking at an Amazon item, you’ll notice a small camel icon appear in your address bar. Click it to reveal all that The Camelizer has to offer. You can view price graphs for the item sold by Amazon as well as by third party stores, and compare prices between new and used items. You can easily remove any of those to focus on the retailer you’re interested in, and also change the graph’s range to anything from 1 month to the product’s entire history.

If there’s a price you’re willing to pay but you’ve missed it, you can set a price watch through this window as well. Simply enter your desired price and your email address, and get alerted when the price drops.

Not only is The Camelizer a great way to make sure you’re getting a good price, it’s also an interesting extension for anyone who has even the slightest interest in analytics.

Amazon Currency Switch

Is USD not your native currency? Or maybe you’re browsing a different Amazon domain for some reason? Different currencies can get confusing, and while it’s very easy to get a quick conversion using Google, using Amazon Currency Switch makes it even easier.

In the extension’s options, you can choose from 160 different supported currencies, and have all Amazon prices on most Amazon domains display in your native coin. You can also have the original price appear next to the converted price.

This simple extension takes the math or the extra conversion step out of your shopping experience, making it even easier to make decisions.

Everyone knows Amazon has a wish list feature, letting you collect items you want to buy but don’t want to spring for right now. But did you know you could use Amazon’s wish list to collect items you want to buy from other stores? At first I thought this was another way for Amazon to lure you with its superior prices, but I was pleasantly surprised.

This Chrome extension by Amazon itself lets you add any item you encounter anywhere on the Web to your Amazon wishlist, complete with links to the original website and a thumbnail of your choice.

When you’re shopping, click the Amazon icon to add the item on the page to your wishlist. The extension will fill in the product’s name, leaving the price, quantity and comments to you. You can also browse through all the available thumbnails to choose your favorite one.

You can also use the extension for any other lists you’re managing on Amazon, such as shared wishlists for events. This could be a great way to quickly populate a gift list and share it with your friends or guests.

If you’re in the US, you can easily get your hands on anything you see on Amazon, usually with free shipping too. If you’re not, however, and especially if you’re in a country that doesn’t have its own Amazon domain, it’s hard to know if an item ships to your country, and if it does, how much the shipping would cost.

A tiny Chrome extension brings this information to any Amazon product page, so all you have to do is choose your country once, and have the information available right there whenever you shop.

The extension adds a button to every product page that says “Check if the item could be shipped to your country”. Click it to open the table you see above, where you can change the country from the dropdown menu, and decide if you want to view only new products or if you want to see used ones as well.

The interface is simple, although it doesn’t always play well with Amazon’s regular page elements. However, even when there’s an overlap, you can always see the interesting details. This way, you can immediately find out if a product ships to your country, how much it would cost to ship, and which store gives you the best overall price.

Sick of everything always revolving around Amazon.com? Here is an extension dedicated to Amazon.co.uk shoppers. It’s a very simple extension too: all it does it help you conduct speedy searches on Amazon UK, without having to load the page itself every time.

No matter which website you’re on, click the extension’s icon to open a search box. Type in your query, and you’ve just conducted a search on Amazon. It doesn’t do much, but it works like a charm, and it’s a great time saver if you need to search Amazon often.

Get The Most Out Of Amazon

The above extensions are a great place to start if you want to get the most out of Amazon, but if you want to be sure you’re catching all the deals, you’re going to need this ultimate guide for catching Amazon deals. You should also know that Amazon is not all about shopping — there are also some Amazon secrets you may not be aware of. Finally, you should definitely check out our free Amazon shopping guide to bring everything together.

What are your favorite Amazon add-ons and extensions? Do you have shopping tips you’d like to share? Do so below!

Get the best tips from MakeUseOf in your inbox, free!

Stephan Huebner

August 23, 2013

Interesting article.

Though a word of caution may be in order, regarding the “shipping to other countries” fees. Don’t forget customs, which you may have to pay and which may add a substantial amount of money to the price. Plus, it may not even be legal to buy certain items which might get you in trouble when they’re shipped to you.

Yaara Lancet

August 23, 2013

Thanks Stephen. Remembering about customs and important indeed, and I had to pay extra more than once.

As for your second reminder, illegal things are usually pretty obvious, but I might be naive. What item could seem completely fine and end up being illegal in some countries?